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Is your business active on social media? Are you getting as many Likes and Shares as you want?

Everyone knows that having their business on popular social media sites is very important these days. Multi-million dollar companies actually discuss their “Twitter strategy” during their board meetings. It’s no secret that social media is a great source of traffic, whether it’s through likes, shares, retweets, pins, +1s or numerous others.
The tough part, however, is to actually get the traffic, to get a following. Distribution (posting content) is not the hard part. Reaching your audience, is. Here are some of the themes that tend to go “viral” time and again on social media: –

Controversy / negativity

Sympathy and Empathy

Humorous

Now imagine you own an Organic food grocery store. Business is good. But you want to try and sell more, perhaps expand to other areas and open more stores. A friend tells you about this thing called the Internet and how you can use it to sell. So you hesitantly step into the 21st century and start becoming more active on social media. You start posting on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest etc with pictures of organic food, articles about its benefits, even discounts and offers. But you only get a few Likes and Shares. Far less than what you hoped for.

Now take a look at this picture

Imagine if you saw it on your News Feed on Facebook or your Twitter. It’s a nice picture. But you would probably scroll right past it. Back in 2004, it might have hit the spot. Today, simply because how overwhelmed you are by the barrage of daily stimulation, you’re likely to not even remember it in a few minutes unless you were REALLY hungry when you saw it.

But what if you captioned it with big visible text that read: “Share if you think the government should subsidize organic food products“. You would probably get more activity on your post. People tend to like blaming the government for almost everything.

Let’s turn it up a notch. What if you wrote: “Share if you think schools should only feed children with organic food“. What do you think your return is going to be on that one compared to putting up the post with a “30% discount” offer? Every parent would relate to it, share it, their friends who are also parents would share it and on and on. It is far more engaging than any article about benefits of organic food or how it prevents cancer. People aren’t on social media for more information, they can get that any time they want. They’re on social media to have their brains tickled (for the science nerds out there, think Dopamine stimulation)

Now don’t expect all these people to become your customers by next Tuesday. The point is, you are building a following, you are building your BRAND. People will buy when they are ready, as long as your brand keeps showing up occasionally on their Newsfeed. You do not need to interrupt their pattern by forcing your way into their lives with Ads. Speaking of Ads, did you know that a study of 10,000 people showed that 90% of them couldn’t even remember the right-hand side of a website? Because that is where Ad banners have lived since the Internet was born. Think about that the next time you pay $25 for a click.

Think outside the box. Create an inbound marketing strategy that will pay dividends in the long run. Use social media to your advantage. Look at what is trending and replicate it. Or keep bidding against your competitors to pay more for Ads. The choice is yours.